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Wednesday, March 06, 2013

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 2

I didn’t read the nine
stories in Hester Kaplan’s The Edge of
Marriage so much as I experienced them – which is, in my opinion, the best
thing you can say about a book.Sentence
by sentence the prose is distinctive, assured, and wise (“Children grow when
they sleep, but old people evaporate at night, they float toward the ceiling in
little wisps, and every day there’s a lot less”;), but it is in the characters
and their conflicts that this collection shines.

The stories’ circumstances
are emotionally complex and ordinary at the same time, so that inhabiting them
feels at once familiar and fresh; it’s easy to imagine our way in, but once we
get there, we find ourselves exploring new psychic territory by virtue of
Kaplan’s gift for describing the storm in a singular soul.The
owner of a seaside resort trying to restore the place after a hurricane manages
to attract a full house, then has to decide what to do when some complain that
a guest visibly ill with AIDS is ruining their vacation.A man
trying to protect his grown son lies to cover the son’s crime, but finds it compromises
his relationship with his wife.A woman
whose husband has been incapacitated in a car accident struggles with her decision
to leave a man she no longer loves, but who can no longer take care of himself.

Kaplan is equally
adept at portraying male and female perspectives; in fact, more than half of
the collection’s nine stories are told by men, mostly in the context of marriage
and fatherhood.In the poignant “From
Where We’ve Fallen,” the narrator Davis violates his own moral code by implicating
one of his employees, a young woman he likes and wants to protect, in a theft
he knows his son committed.Then he
fires the employee.Learning the truth,
his wife says to Davis, “What a hateful thing you’ve done.What’s happened
to you?” and she insists that for their own sake, he must tell their son to
leave for good.“When I woke him,” Davis
tells us, “I said the words, that he had to go and couldn’t come back, but I
didn’t mean them.I didn’t even believe
them.”

In the quietly
moving “Goodwill,” a woman complies with her father’s request to sort out her
deceased mother’s belongings and remove them from her parents’ bedroom. “There’s no way of knowing what a woman owns
until she’s dead,” the narrator observes.“Until it’s time to clean out her closets and drawers to make room for
something else, there’s no way of knowing what she needed, and wanted, to
hide.”

These are just a
couple of examples of Kaplan’s skill, displayed abundantly throughout the book,
at using simple language to portray complicated emotions.We never see the author’s hand, but her heart
is all over the page.

She also shows a
keen instinct for how and when to mix in a little humor with her drama.In the final compelling story “Live Life King
Sized,” the resort owner Kip – who spends his days trying to balance his
respect for Henry Blaze, who has come to the island to die, with the delicate
obligation not to disgust his other paying guests – finds himself trying to justify
his situation to his mother when she tells him, “I hear you’re running a leper
colony down there.”

“Yes, a leper
colony,” Kip replies.“We got body parts all over the place, but we
can fit fifteen people in one bed.”Moments like these are what elevate Hester Kaplan’s fiction to real life:
she makes us laugh and ache at the same time, and even though it may not feel
comfortable in the moment, we are thoroughly grateful for both.

Jessica Treadway is the author of PLEASE COME BACK TO ME (2010). She is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a novel, And Give You Peace.